N.S. faces affordable housing challenge

A huge demographic shift and dwindling federal cash has provincial officials working on the complex question of how to provide housing to low-income Nova Scotians in the coming years.

The province now has about 18,000 affordable housing units and will work over the next couple of years on how best to use units that become available, said Robert Wood, deputy community services minister.

For example, if a four-bedroom home opens up in a community where the need is for one- or two-bedroom units, there is the question of turning it into a duplex or triplex. Or, if there isn’t a need, does the province sell it to help fund other projects, said Wood.

Wood said many of the province’s units were built in the 1960s and ’70s — about one-third of the units are more than 50 years old — when there was a need for larger homes. But he said from 1996 to 2010, the number of single-person or single-parent households in the province has jumped to 64 per cent from 27.

“There’s this massive shift in the demographics of Nova Scotia, and because you hold fixed assets, those homes don’t necessarily match what the core housing need is,” Wood said after appearing at the legislature’s public accounts committee meeting.

“Over the next number of years, we really need to be planning out, not just what we need today, but where is that demographic going to, so that over the next 20 years, we’re actually meeting and matching what the housing need is actually going to be.”

Part of the work will also be figuring out how to create a sustainable system. Federal funding for social housing, which has been at more than $50 million a year for the last 15 years, is scheduled to steadily decline to zero in 2035.

Woods said the money primarily goes to the operation and maintenance of social housing now, and those costs will eventually be left to the province.

The province announced a 10-year housing strategy Monday, a plan critics said was short on detail.

After the meeting Wednesday, Liberal MLA Diana Whalen said she is concerned about the partnerships the province enters into with developers.

There are buildings the province has helped finance, in exchange for units being available at below-market rents, Whalen said. However, she said the agreements expire in a decade, allowing the rents to go up to market rates.

Whalen said the strategy’s release was about optics.

“I think they’re bringing it now because it’s pre-election. They want to say they’ve addressed housing.”

There are 4,000 people on the province’s waiting list for affordable housing, including those already in a unit and waiting for one of a different type or at a different location, according to the Community Services Department.

The income threshold to qualify varies by region and the size of the unit. It ranges from $29,000 for a one-bedroom unit in rural areas to $45,500 for a unit with three or more bedrooms in Halifax Regional Municipality.